[Intelligence Seminar] CFP of interest: AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D)

[Noah A Smith]

From: Roni Rosenfeld
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2009 7:55 PM
Subject: AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D)

This may be of interest to some.

-Roni


AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D)



Call for Papers



There has been great interest in information and communication
technology for development (ICT-D) over the last several years. The
work is diverse and extends from information technologies that provide
infrastructure for micropayments to techniques for monitoring and
enhancing the cultivation of crops. While efforts in ICT-D have been
interdisciplinary, ICT-D has largely overlooked opportunities for
harnessing machine learning and reasoning to create new kinds of
services, and to serve a role in analyses of data that may provide
insights about socioeconomic development for disadvantaged
populations. The unprecedented volume of data currently being
generated in the developing world on human health, movement,
communication, and financial transactions provides new opportunities
for applying machine learning methods to development efforts, however.

Our aim is to foster the creation of a subfield of ICT-D, which we
refer to as artificial intelligence for development (AI-D), to harness
these opportunities. To this end, we hope the AAAI Spring Symposium at
Stanford will serve as a focal point to bring together a critical mass
of researchers who are interested in applying AI research to
development challenges.



The goals of the symposium will be to (1) identify a core set of AI-D
researchers, (2) explore key topics and representative projects in
this realm, and (3) to lay out an ontology of AI-D research challenges
and opportunities. We are seeking original contributions in the form
of both full papers and position papers on a wide range of related
topics. For example, papers could address the potential for machine
reasoning to make valuable off-line and real-time inferences from the
large-scale mobile phone data sets currently being generated in the
developing world. Such analytics could provide a better understanding
of social relationships and information flows in disadvantaged
societies, as well as guiding and monitoring ICT-D interventions and
public policy, and giving insight into population responses to crises.

Other topics would include exploring how machine learning and
inference could help us understand human mobility patterns, yielding,
for example, real-time estimates of the progression of disease
outbreaks and guiding public health interventions. Machine reasoning
could also provide remote areas with medical support through automated
diagnosis, along with guidance for the effective triaging of limited
resources and human medical expertise. Additional potential topics
include instant machine translation for better communication and
coordination among people who speak different languages, user modeling
for online tutoring, investment advisory tools, and simulation,
modeling, and decision support for agricultural optimization.



The AAAI Artificial Intelligence for Development Spring Symposium at
Stanford will help define this new research area, and identify the
next steps to establishing a sustainable and vibrant AI-D research
community. In conjunction with Symposium, we are working to build a
community of researchers with interests in AI-D, as well as to
identify and make available case libraries of data (such as
communication logs, financial transactions, and local market prices)
for research.  A site has been created for AI-D researchers at
http://AI-D.org .



Submissions:

Interested participants should submit full papers (6 pages) and
position papers (2 pages) in AAAI format to submissions at AI-D.org.

Selected papers from the symposium will be published as an AAAI
technical report.



Organizing Committee:

Nathan Eagle, cochair (Santa Fe Institute)

Eric Horvitz, cochair (Microsoft Research)

Shawndra Hill, data cochair (Wharton)

Ravi Jain data cochair (Google)

Saleema Amershi (University of Washington)

Gaetano Boriello (University of Washington and Google)

Neil Ferguson (Imperial, UK)

Ashish Kapoor (Microsoft Research)

John Quinn (Makerere University, Uganda)

Roni Rosenfeld (Carnegie Mellon University)

Kentaro Toyama (Microsoft Research)

Peter Waiganjo Wagacha (University of Nairobi)



Dates:

*           Submissions for the symposia are due on October 31, 2009

*           Notification of acceptance will be given by November 27, 2009

*           Camera-ready material must be received by January 22, 2010

*           Symposium at Stanford University will be held on March 22-24, 2010